John Licciardone, DO, MS, MBA, professor and director of clinical research at the Osteopathic Research Center, has been named an Osteopathic Heritage Foundation Clinical Research Chair. The ORC is located at UNT Health Science Center.

Along with Dr. Licciardone’s title comes funding from the Osteopathic Heritage Foundation to support him and a research team in expanding the ORC’s research. Currently, the ORC looks at how osteopathic manipulative treatment can be used for treating various disorders.

With the grant funding, Dr. Licciardone will look more closely at OMT use for the treatment of chronic low back pain and other musculoskeletal disorders, refinement of placebo control treatments for pain and functioning, assessment of somatovisceral and viscerosomatic manifestations of disease, and description of the natural history and epidemiology of somatic dysfunction.

Dr. Licciardone also plans to expand his research into osteopathic health services and policy research, which will include the Osteopathic Survey of Health Care in America, the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, and a systematic review and meta-analysis of osteopathic clinical trials. This research is intended not only to study patient outcomes with osteopathic treatment, but to promote patient awareness of osteopathic physicians and encourage their use as primary care physicians.

Dr. Licciardone administered the previous Osteopathic Surveys of Health Care in America. He said that he hopes to further findings from the previous surveys.

“With this research, we’d like to have more focused questions and look more specifically at racial and ethnic minority groups,” he said.

The previous survey found that only 9 percent of the population said that their primary care physician was a doctor of osteopathic medicine, with racial and ethnic minorities having the lowest percentage of respondents who used a DO as their primary care physician.

“The previous surveys gave us some valuable information, but we weren’t always able to determine the reasons for the results we observed,” Dr. Licciardone said. “We’re hoping to answer more of those questions with this research.”

The grant from the Osteopathic Heritage Foundation is a four-year, $2 million award in support of the grant application, “ORC Osteopathic Heritage Foundation Chairs and Teams.”